More from the Author

Uber Technologies Inc., the popular ride-hailing company, entered 2017 having doubled its bookings in 2016 and achieving a valuation of nearly $70 billion, making it the largest venture capital-backed company in the world. Co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick embodied the company, with a hard-charging attitude embedded in the company's workplace culture that allowed it to successfully take on the entrenched taxi industry. Uber looked to enjoy another year of global growth in 2017, until lawsuits and a cascading series of scandals surrounding that same workplace culture led a group of powerful investors to seek Kalanick's resignation to protect their investment. This case presents an overview of the growth of Uber, the impact of Kalanick, and the role that Uber's board of directors had in shaping the company's growth. It centers on the factors leading to Uber board members and investors to call for Kalanick's resignation, focusing on how board oversight can help shape company culture and how entrepreneurial boards deal with founder CEOs. The case also deals with the recommendations of the report prepared by ex-U.S. attorney general Eric Holder on Uber's workplace culture, and how those recommendations will, or will not, help the company, and the role that the board has in shepherding in those changes.

In this essay, my goal is to explore why, despite the tireless efforts of talented people, research on corporate governance has been slow and uneven, and where that research should turn to next to be most valuable to practitioners. My belief is that the most fruitful work thus far has recognized that corporate boards are dynamic social systems, has identified all the forces that shape those systems, and has acknowledged that boards should seek to represent a wide variety of stakeholders, not just shareholders. The best way for me to establish this argument is to trace the history of research on corporate boards and analyze the trends in that research, including the relative value of the types of data that researchers in this field have used. Ultimately, I identify what I consider to be the best path forward in studying these complex social systems. I have made a deliberate choice to focus primarily on research that reflects firsthand experience with boards rather than on research that utilizes data derived from questionnaires and other secondary sources. Not everyone will agree with my choices, but my hope is that my perspective will nonetheless provide some guidance for people working in this evolving field to understand the true complexity of corporate boards.

CSI's business unit managers gathered around the downstairs conference room for the company's weekly meeting to discuss project bids. Cristina WaldAshley Hartman, who was in charge of finding projects for the engineering firm to work on, read through several she had identified while others in the room took notes. Since CSI's founding thirty-five years ago, the company had grown substantially. The growth so far had been fueled by the company's ability to diversify into other services in the construction and engineering space. CSI had a strong market and customer base in Uruguay but realized that in order to be successful it needed to expand internationally. One of the key objectives for CSI in 2016 was to build a clear plan for this expansion and design an organizational structure which could support its growth.